Shakespeare: Titus Andronicus, Q1 (1594).

This play about multiple revenges is not historical though purporting to be set in the declining years of the Roman Empire (4th-5th c. A.D.). At best it may show how the empire approached collapse in confrontation with barbaric alien cultures. The anonymous play A Knack to Know a Knave, acted in 1592, alludes to Titus and the Goths. However, this "Roman" tragedy does exploit the mythological story of Procne and Philomela found in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Its brutalities cast it in the Roman tradition of Senecan tragedy: S. Clark Hulse calculated the number of atrocities in the play: “It has 14 killings, 9 of them on stage, 6 severed members, 1 rape (or 2 or 3 depending on how you count), 1 live burial, 1 case of insanity, and 1 of cannibalism—-an average of 5.2 atrocities per act, or one for every 97 lines.”

T. S. Eliot claimed that the play was the "worst play ever written" (Bate, Jonathan. Titus Andronicus. C.L. Publishing. 1995. p. 27). Because of its brutality it has been regarded as either a very early work of Shakespeare, or even attributable in whole or part to some other author, such as George Peele, associated with this kind of script. The play was enormously popular in its time (this titlepage says three companies performed it), but it was avoided in the 19th c. because of its sadism, which has now returned it to success because of the fascination of our age with such current fads as the cult of vampires. Productions often require the presence of medical resources to handle hysterical audience members (as seen regularly at a recent Santa Cruz production). Picture and data courtesy of the Yorck Project, under Creative Commons Attribution-Share- Alike License (Wikipedia).